


Soft

by gitta



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-05-27 19:04:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6296116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gitta/pseuds/gitta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Elektra first meets Stick, she is eleven years old. She kills for the first time a year later, and doesn’t regret it until Matthew doesn’t kill Roscoe.</p><p>(Character Study, all about Elektra. Spoilers for a little more then half of Daredevil season 2)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soft

**Author's Note:**

> So, uh, this is terrible. haven't even finished the stupid show, but uh, i love Elektra so much, so..... spoilers. This has also not been beta-read, so sorry about mistypes.

When Elektra first meets Stick, she is eleven years old. She kills for the first time a year later, and doesn’t regret it until Matthew doesn’t kill Roscoe.

 

 

For the years in between, a part of her blames Stick for how she is. She has not desire to be better, but she sees happy people walking down the street and wishes her ways of finding that happiness were so limited. They weren’t once, before Stick, so she blames him. She thinks that something about him, his training, his manipulations, makes it impossible to resist killing. But than Matthew doesn’t kill Roscoe, can’t or won’t kill Roscoe, and she realizes that it is her. Stick is possible to resist, but she simply isn’t strong enough.

 

She doesn’t lie to herself and say it wasn’t within her. It takes a lot to be able to kill as easily as she does, and she had the qualities within herself. The disregard for others, the knowledge that the world isn’t fair, the selfishness. It was all within her far before she met Stick. And maybe it she hadn’t met Stick, than it would have faded, been replaced with other qualities. Many children are selfish, and disregard the world and some even know the evil in the world. But instead of teaching her to resist those qualities, Stick encourages them. And destroys the one that try to fight them.

 

 

Her mother dies when she is ten, and it’s her father’s fault. Her idiot father who tried to double cross the Hand. They shoot her full of arrows and put her on the front lawn. Elektra finds her, coming home from day school in her little uniform. Her mother had insisted on not sending her away to boarding school, though Elektra had begged at the time. Her mother was the one to teach her about the awfulness of the world. Whispering to her in Cambodian, because her father never bothered to learn his wife’s language, about all sorts of things, about the atrocities of wars, about the cruelties of men, about the necessity of survival. Her mother whispers to her about a man her mother killed, about how he was probably going to hurt her mother, so her mother grabbed the knife at her table and stabbed him in the neck. Elektra fumes at her funeral, knowing that her father should have just put her mother in command, and her mother would have known what to do with the Hand. Her mother had the intelligence and the brutality that would have brought her high in the Hand. 

 

Worse still if the fact that her father will likely be selfish and foolish enough to try again, and this time it will be Elektra they come for. Her father is far too connected in the Greek Government for the Hand to kill him outright. Better for his lovely, exotic family to die in increasingly mysterious circumstances. Elektra’s pride, which has always been there, her fury, which begun at her mother’s funeral, will not allow her to be a victim of her father’s incompetence. So she runs away, ten years old and already strong. 

 

 

Stick finds her embarrassing fast, which is to be expected. Elektra always wonders if he was watching her, waiting for to prove herself, if running away proved that she could be a member of the Chaste. When she kills, she wonders if that was her proving herself. It isn’t till she is much older that she realizes that’s what Stick wanted. He wanted her to be constantly afraid of losing her sport, constantly proving her worth. Stick needed her to be loyal to him, and she is, for far longer than she should have been.

 

He calls her ‘Ellie’, no matter how many times she tells him her name was Elektra. It’s funny because when her father called her Elektra, she would always tell him that her name is Chanthavy, which was what her mother called her. It strikes her when she is nineteen that she will never get Stick to stop, so she stops trying. Than she meets Matthew.  
For all Stick’s claims that he is not a sentimental man, he cares about Matthew. Or he acts like he does. He acts like Matthew is the one that got away, as well as the Chosen One, as well as his estranged son. During her training, he talks about him so she knows that he’s a much better fighter than her, and that he’s soft. She may not have perfect attacks, and sometimes she gets overtired, but she can make the kill. Stick never accuses her of being soft, not until she meets Matthew. 

 

 

His far from her first mission like this. Stick has many men and women who take his orders and he knows what each and everyone’s is best at. She resents that he has noticed the way men are around her and has taken advantage of it. They always want to impress her, and it is far too easy to act unimpressed. She slowly warms, and they eat it up. She is bored with it, which is perhaps the only thing about Matthew’s first assessment of her that is correct. She has her father’s money and she does bored little debutante very well, but it isn’t her truth, not like how Matthew thinks it is, in that first meeting. Later, once she is in love with him, she wishes he had seen her, all of her. 

 

She feels understood though, even if he doesn’t know all of her. There are little things, like the way he holds himself, later the way he fights, that she recognizes from Stick’s training. She’s met others that Stick trained, other members of the Chaste, but they usually older. Some are even Stick’s equals rather than his pupils. Matthew and her, though. They’re different; they’re Stick’s children, the ones that he created from the ground up. She’s the perfect second attempt, and Matthew is the flawed first. She understands him and he her, because they were molded by Stick. It is an intoxicating thing, to be understood.

 

 

That’s why it feels like such a betrayal that he doesn’t.

 

She understands him after that, though. He is good in a way that she cannot be, with her selfishness and her disregard. She is so angry after she leaves him, after Roscoe doesn’t die. She is angry at him for being good, and not being like her. She is angry because he didn’t told her that he was good. He let her believe that she was like him. And ever since that day in his father’s ring, she has become attached to the idea of loving him, and him loving her. Obviously, she was wrong. 

 

She spends far too long being sad about him, and running to the ends of the earth to escape him. Stick doesn’t ask what happened, but he watches her. It’s careful, like he knows how soft she has become. That’s what Matthew really taught, in that night. Soft doesn’t mean unwilling to kill. It means able to be hurt. And she has become soft.

**Author's Note:**

> quick note about Elektra's Cambodian name (went with Cambodian bc that's what Elodie Yung is). i looked it up on the internet, and it means "beautiful moon girl" i chose it because elektra means "the fiery sun" and i thought the duality would be cool. i got both of those from the internet, so please tell me if it's totally wrong.


End file.
